Secret New Sensors Sniff For Afghanistan’s Fertilizer Bombs

BAGRAM AIR FIELD, Afghanistan — Improvised explosive devices, the signature enemy weapon of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, aren’t just a lethal threat here. They’re also near-impossible to spot with traditional means. The U.S. military is launching a new experimental program, known as Project Ursus, to sniff them out.

Earlier this year, the Pentagon’s top anti-IED organization, known as JIEDDO, acknowledged that insurgents in Afghanistan weren’t using the same kinds of materials to make bombs as insurgents did in Iraq. Specifically, they’re using fertilizers to concoct an explosive charge, much like Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh did. JIEDDO’s leader, Lieutenant General Michael Oates, told bloggers on a March conference call that the Afghan IED threat “centered around two types of fertilizer: potassium chloride and ammonium nitrate.”

Afghan President Hamid Karzai banned the substances in February. But the fertilizer bombs have continued. And the metal-detection efforts the military employed to find bombs built around old ordnance shells and other metals in Iraq wouldn’t work. “We still have a technological challenge for detection [for] these low-metallic/non-metallic bombs,” Oates admitted.

Project Ursus is an answer to Oates’ challenge.

In a kind of ironic symmetry, Project Ursus is operated by Task Force ODIN, the secretive bomber-targeting team that became famous for fighting IED networks in Iraq. But much as the IED threat has evolved — from Iraq to Afghanistan; from metals to fertilizers — so has ODIN. The task force is now geared around getting ground commanders robust tactical intelligence and going after insurgent IED networks, typically leaving the hunt for the bombs themselves to a different Afghanistan-based task force, known as Paladin. But ODIN’s leaders, Lieutenant Colonel Kevin Diermeier and his executive officer, Major Jason Periatt, are making an exception.

Diermeier and Periatt would only discuss Project Ursus in the vaguest of terms. But Ursus is aimed at finding what Diermeier and Periatt were allowed to call “generic homemade explosive observables.” To cut through the bureaucratese, Ursus is a surveillance program housed in a pod on the bottom of a piloted commercial King Air twin-engine turboprop plane (the MC-12 is one such modified aircraft) that hunts down the chemical signatures of fertilizers used in Afghanistan’s IEDs.

It’s an experimental program, barely out of the first month of a six-month trial run, so ODIN-Afghanistan’s leaders says it’s too soon to tell how successful it is. But so far, Ursus hasn’t accidentally confused any latrines or farms with bomb factories.

“Project Ursus is one of my few platforms specifically tied into Task Force Paladin’s mission set,” Diermeier says. “Initial indications are that it’s proving its value on the battlefield.” He all but apologizes for not being able to say more, promising that the Ursus is powered by “cool stuff I’d love to tell you about.”

It’s unfortunate — if not unexpected — that operational security restrictions prevent Diermeier from discussing how Ursus works. But ultimately, he won’t need to talk about Ursus. He’ll need to show how it can curb the escalating pace of IED assaults in Afghanistan — a threat that’s risen from 300 incidents a month in December 2008, when ODIN arrived in Afghanistan, to 1,128 in May 2010 (although most of those incidents didn’t kill anyone). Ursus could be a tool to get homemade bombs under control.